item: 223

Tatum Salt Dome Blast

Item # 180-269

The photograph was identified by Moncrief as "Salt Dome Blast,
1964." Newspaper articles in the Hattiesburg American
indicate
that Moncrief was
one of the many members of the press who covered this event.

On October 22, 1964, a five-kiloton
nuclear device was
detonated 2,700 feet below the surface of the earth in the Tatum salt
dome,
Lamar County. The blast was conducted by the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission
(AEC) and U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) as part of Project Salmon.
The test
was part of the VELA Uniform program, which had been initiated by 1959
recommendations to increase research in seismology. Specifically, they
were
investigating "decoupling theory" and the ability to detect or hide
underground
nuclear detonations in cavities. Such research was significant in
determining
whether the Soviet Union was conducting secret nuclear tests.5

The majority of tests were conducted at the AEC's Nevada site,
but the Tatum
salt dome near Baxterville, Lamar County, and Bruinsburg dome near Port
Gibson,
Claiborne County, were identified as suitable mediums for testing. In
February
1961, AEC leased a 1,400-acre area from the Tatum Lumber and Pecan
Company, and
site preparation and cavity drilling began. The Salmon test, identified
in
local news reports as part of Project Dribble, was originally scheduled
for
September 1963 but was delayed due to bad weather. At ground zero the
nuclear
charge was located "in solid rock salt beneath a 600 foot concrete plug
and
2100 feet of gravel." The official command post was located
approximately 2½ miles southwest of ground zero. In addition
to
seismographs at the
command post, equipment was also placed locally near Wiggins,
Tylertown,
Purvis, Prentiss, Beaumont, and Ellisville, Mississippi, and in
Bogalusa,
Louisiana. News reports indicate that the countdown began at 9:44 a.m.,
as it
had done on two previous occasions, but this time the crowd of over 50
"newsmen,
politicians and observers mounted on the crest of the hill to watch the
shot"
were not disappointed as the blast exploded precisely at 10:00 a.m.
Reporters at
the scene described how the "earth rolled and bumped three or four
times
shaking a communications trailer and other structures and bobbing 50
cars and
trucks on their springs." Project employee Billy
Ray
Anderson recalled how the observation trailer rocked and rolled and
"[t]hose
politicians came running out of the trailer, grabbing their
handkerchiefs and
wiping sweat off their foreheads."6

AEC officials were pleased with the results and stressed that
the odds were
"better than 100 to one against any detectable quantity of radiations
above the
plugged hole." They reported "there was no indication of anything
occurring
except what was expected." At the command post some equipment was
dislodged
and communications and subterranean listening devices were "knocked
out."
Residents within a mile and a half of the blast site had been asked to
leave
their homes during the test and were paid a nominal sum for the
inconvenience.
They were allowed back after 1:00 p.m. that day. Prior to the blast,
the
chimneys, porches, and out-buildings of some local homes were braced.
Immediately after the blast, reports of damage began to filter in, and
by
October
26 AEC had received 205 complaints about structural damage. Most of
these
were minor, but the papers reported that the home of at least one
family
was
rendered uninhabitable. In addition to cracks in homes and road paving,
Billy
Ray Anderson, who drove a water truck during the project, remembered
having to
deliver water to local residents whose wells were soured and turned
black with
silt.7

After Salmon, a second nuclear test, Project Sterling, was
held at Tatum on
December 3, 1966. Two non-nuclear tests were
detonated on February 2, 1969,
and April 9, 1970, as part of the Miracle Play program. No further
testing took
place at the site. In 1971, AEC began decommissioning the site, which
included
dismantling equipment and mobile facilities and cleaning up a
contaminated
waste pit. Upon completion in 1972, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
established a long-term hydrological monitoring program. A
commemorative stone
marker was also erected on the spot where the nuclear devices were
lowered into
the ground. Since its closure, anxiety about radioactive contamination
in the
area has risen. In 1979, after University of Mississippi chemists
discovered
contaminated amphibians, Governor Cliff Finch closed the area to the
public and
evacuated residents. The scare subsided when the scientists retracted
their
findings due to the realization that the results had been caused by
contaminated equipment. Elevated tritium (a radioactive isotope) levels
were
discovered in the 1990s, and the DOE expanded its work at the site with
a
program of Remedial Investigation and Feasibility studies, headed by
the DOE
Nevada field office. In addition, state health department and DOE
studies of
the rates of reported cancer-related deaths in the locality in the
1980s did
not find elevated cancer rates among those living close to the test
site.
Regular State Department of Health, DOE, and Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) tests continue to show no evidence of off-site
contamination or public safety concerns. However, these findings do
little to quell the fears of some residents, who see a link
between cancer deaths in the area and the nuclear
tests. Today the site is a wilderness that was purchased by the
government
in 1992 and remains fenced off from the public.8